[admin_only] Improvements

Some offside situations were not being considered until now: when a player shoots and the ball hits the bar or is deflected a teammate could get the ball even if he was offside at the moment of the shot.

Players used to always run when they moved, now their pace depends on the situation and mentality. If a player moves there are 3 paces (from faster to slower):
1) When with the ball or when moving towards to ball.
2) When mentality is 0
3) When moving forward and mentality is -1 or when moving back and mentality is 1

RubySoccer is now available in Russian! The translation is not 100% done yet, but Russian speakers can enjoy most of the game translated to this language thanks to Andrew Andreev. Or should I say Андрей Андреев? :)

Even though there is still a lot to do in the match engine I decide to release a package of changes:

- decision to shoot depends on how many players are between the attacker and the goal, since now the shot can be intercepted
- players are more aware when the path to the goal is free so they can decide to run instead of passing the ball
- defenders will try to stay close to attackers when opponent has the ball
- players can pass the ball to teammates behind when there are no suitable teammates ahead

These changes are already in place. Please give your feedback in the improvements discussion topic.

New option available on manager settings: “Schedule friendlies on season start?”.

Using this option friendlies will be scheduled automatically for your team on a new season start, the same way done for CPU teams. Your opponent will be randomly picked between CPU teams and other managers who also marked this new option and will be the same on all matches. There will be 48 matches scheduled, 1 every 3 turns.

A National Cup icon was added to the menu so you can go directly to the National Cup page without having to go through the league table page. It is a small enhancement but after a long time I am back to work!

Adjustments are being made to some leagues in order to achieve our goal of 20 teams and 3 relegation / promotion spots per league. Argentina and Brazil already have 20 teams per league so it was just a matter of reducing the relegation / promotion spots from 4 to 3 (except for Brazil on FastTicker because the season has already ended and a human managed team wouldn’t be promoted, which is unfair). Germany, Netherlands and Russia had their relegation spots reduced so that the first dvision can have 20 teams in the next season, new teams will be added to their second divisions in the future to make it 20. Other countries remain the same for now.

New countries will be added to FastTicker during the season tick. I expect everything to run smoothly, but if anything bad happens don’t panic, I will take a look as soon as I am available, which will probably take a few hours.

We have been seeing a number higher than what we should have of unexpected match results. By unexpected I mean a match where the better team or at least the team who played better looking at the stats is not the winner. Our top priority now is to finish the tweaks I started last year in order to make the match engine more realistic.

Cough, cough…there is a lot of dust around here! RubySoccer ain’t dead mates, it has finally been updated. Hopefully following news won’t take so long.

Managers now can’t fire or let their best players go, their board won’t allow it. Of course there will be lots of discussions around how the board evaluates the best players, but at least it is a start. One of our goals with it is to prevent users from losing good players for lack of attention or doing it on purpose.

Dimensions don’t get locked during the whole tick anymore, only during critical updates like contract negotiatons and job applications processing. It means you can still navigate in a dimension while most updates are being done. You should be aware that some changes might not be applied until the next update. For example, if you changed your formation during the update and your match that turn had already been processed your formation changes won’t be used until your next match.

Small adjustment to match parameters in a tentative to reduce the number of “unfair” results. Let’s keep an eye on the results. I’m sure you guys will keep informing us when any of these happens. Keep in mind that they should still happen, but less frequently.

When being disputed by more than one club the players used to decide where to go based only in the highest wage, but not anymore. The player decision has been enhanced to also consider first team opportunity, in other words, how good he is compared to his future teammates in the same position.

Example: team A and team B are making offers to an attacker. In team A he would become the 2nd best attacker, in team B he would become the 4th best attacker. If team A and team B offer the same wage, or even if team B’s offer is slightly better, he will go to team A. In order to hire the player team B must make a much better offer.

There is no easy way to tell how much more team B needs to offer in a situation like the one above, only practical situations will tell you that. It really depends on player quality (the higher the quality, higher the wage difference needed) and relative position difference (2nd best vs. 3rd best, 1st best vs. 5th best…the higher this position difference, higher the wage difference needed).

After running hundreds of match simulations we’ve come up with a possible solution for the high number of “unjust” matches. These are the matches where a team clearly dominates the game but can’t win. Before the latest changes we had about 20%-25% of unjust results, now this number should be around 10%-15%. The small clubs must stand a chance, afterall :-)

No more crazy formations for CPU teams. At least 3 defenders, 3 midfielders and 1 attacker must be used. Unless they don’t have enough players available in a particular position, of course.

This change also applies for when you don’t have a complete formation setup. If you have a formation with all players and some of them are not available the old logic is still applied, with subsitute players being placed on the same position of the unavailable players. So no need to worry, this enhancement will not mess up your existing formations.

This season there will be no relegation in Paraguay for both dimensions and all div 2 teams will be promoted, leaving the country with a single 22 teams division. Soon more teams will join countries with less than 20 teams on their divisions. The goal is to give all countries similar conditions to compete against each other.

If you play on Uruguay or Portugal in FastTicker don’t worry about the missing relegation spots on first division and the extra promotion spot on second division, this is all part of the addition of new clubs next season. Other countries receiving new clubs are Germany, Netherlands, Turkey and Russia. Soon the same setup will be made on MediumTicket.

New countries setup done in MediumTicker as well, next season all leagues will have at least 20 teams, putting everybody in the same level when it comes to finances, improving players, managing stamina, etc.

Fix: international expectation for some teams show “Reach group phase” when it should really say “Reach quarter-finals”. As expectations are generated at the beginning of the season this problem will be fixed only next season.

National squads are out there. If you go to your countries league page you’ll see a National Squad tab which will take you to the countries’ national squad page. There is also a new National Squad competitions page under the Leagues menu.

For now national squads cannot be managed, but it will be possible soon. All the rules involving the national squad management will be announced when it’s ready.

There will be 3 competitions for national squads, starting next season: European Cup, Copa America and the World Cup! Players won’t lose stamina when playing for the national squad, but will gain some valuable experience points. Besides these competitions, national squads will play a fixed number of friendlies against each other, these friendlies are scheduled on season start.

Currently you’re not informed if you have any player who is part of a national squad, but we are working on it as well. No official club matches will happen at the same turn as national squad matches, so you don’t need to worry about your players being unavailable for being lined up in a national squad match.

Well, I guess that’s all for now, more exciting stuff around national squads will be unveiled soon.